Month: August 2008

Categories
Halloween Movies

Movies: Slick Claymation Zombies

Stop motion animation of any kind is a labor of love. Sure, computers have made some aspects slightly less tedious but the technique still involves taking hundreds of pictures and moving figures thousands of times. So even on a merely technical level this short claymation video is impressive.

But also consider the sheer quantity of gore in this clip. It would be impossible or at least highly cost prohibitive in most other kinds of video. The storyline too is fine. The same producer made earlier pieces that are much rougher.

Part One

Part Two

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #176 – The Stone Vampires

(Male, 40’s) Despite the fact that this nightmare was about vampires, the overall feel I had was frustration more than fear. I was a member of a team of about 5 professionals who were looking over a building with the perspective of renting it or buying it. It was a standard building by which I mean a generic office space without cubicles. And it was completely windowless. Sound like the office where you work?

The weird thing was that the place had about a half dozen life-sized marble statues. As we sort of wandered the space, these statues would quickly turn into flesh and blood, living (or I guess non-living) vampires, attack one of our group, then change back to a statue. We’d rush over and would notice the mutilated corpse and not realize that the statue had anything to do with it. This happened over and over but no one listened when I suggested “Hey, maybe we should get out of here.” Then I actually *saw* one of the attacks but again, no one was much concerned. It was down to me and the Boss, who incidentally looked like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the statues changed and tried to attack him but he was able to hold it at an arm’s distance and do something to it to kill it. Now the trick became trying to kill the vampires when they changed but obviously before they changed back to stone which was much harder.

At one point there were two vampires attacking me — it probably doesn’t matter but they were female vampires with flowing glittery skirts, like they were nightclub vampires — and the only thing they could grab onto was one of my fingers which I kept them from biting, though I must confess I was getting pretty tired of being human at that point with all the drudgery of office work, the stupidity of my co-workers and the arrogance of my boss. But we defeated the vampires that were in the main room of the office.

My dream ended when I opened the double doors of a closet and there were two more, female vampires.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #175 – Creatures in the Basement

(Male, 30’s) I sent you a nightmare a ways back that felt like this dream or at least I think I did.

It was a weekend and I was trying to avoid seeing my Mother who at least in the nightmare was a nagging hypochondriac. So me and a buddy get in the car and drive up to visit my Grandmother. This is creepy thing number one because my Grandmother is dead.

We get there and Gramma welcomes us in but there is strangely very little furniture in the house. Then there’s a knock at the door and Gramma tells us we have to hide in the basement and not make much noise. At the door are a couple of my aunts and uncles as well as my mother. They’d gone out on a singing excursion, sort of showing up places and singing songs, kind of like Christmas carolers except it wasn’t winter and they weren’t singing carols.

My buddy and I go down to the basement and Gramma locks us in. It is dark but we can still see quite a bit from the light coming in by the side windows. The walls are a rotting brick, red brick that’s powdering away to dust. The basement also feels MUCH larger than the house above. We hear something skitter across the concrete. We investigate. There is this huge cut of beef, already roasted, like the kind you sometimes see at fancy buffets but this huge roast is just sitting on the floor of this filthy basement. It is all dried out and what’s weird is that it’s been nibbled and chewed at. I tell my friend that we need to get out of here. We slowly move back to the stairs when we hear more skittering. I bend down close to the ground to look under neath the random pieces of furniture. I see at least three creatures, a squirrel, a ground hog and a cat. All are extremely ragged and mangy. Their fur is grey blotched with white. For some reason, I know they’re cannibals maybe because they’ve been eating the dried beef.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #174 – Co-worker’s Dogs

(Male, 30’s) I’ve recently been transferred at work from one building to another and I have to say I’m pretty happy I don’t have to deal with a particular woman at the other location anymore. She was one of those people who can’t stop talking and furthermore, who only talk on and on about themselves. I think she may have liked me because my sense was that she gravitated to me especially.

In the dream, I had gone back to the old location for some reason. I think it was just to say hi to my co-workers. I looked down this long corridor and I saw this talkative woman. She waved at me enthusiastically. She had beside her two very large dogs. I think they were terriers. I waved back to be polite and when the dogs saw me, they took off running down this long corridor toward me. I’m not a “dog person” in life that is I don’t have a dog but I like dogs. When these large creatures bounded down to me, I wasn’t afraid, even though they were barking. Some dogs do that when they’re glad to see someone. I started petting one of them and someone said, “Oh you shouldn’t have started to pet it. That just makes ’em angry.” The next thing I knew the dog had literally swallowed my entire left hand right up to the wrist. The other dog bit onto my arm a little higher up. I started to panic. It wasn’t so much because it hurt because it didn’t really hurt. Rather, I was trapped, held in place by these large dogs. I looked down the hallway for the woman to see if she was going to, well, call off the dogs. And she was gone. For that matter, there was no one anywhere. I didn’t want to cry out but I was really getting scared. I didn’t know what the dogs were going to do to me next.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #173 – Scheming Aliens and a Giant Monster

(Male, 30’s) I’m embarrassed to tell you this one because it’s so over the top grade-B horror movie but in this dream the Earth had been visited by aliens. Nothing scary at all about the aliens. They were were about three feet tall, greenish, humanoid and wore these big oval hats. They were like the perfect 1950’s era alien. These aliens were very friendly. They’d watched our TV and listened to our radio for decades and instead of talking to presidents and prime ministers they just wanted to be on Oprah. And they were. The aliens were the talk of the town all around the world. They were on the front cover of People Magazine, even though of course they weren’t “people” at all in the strictest sense. Everyone loved ’em.

But of course that was all a diversion. While everyone was paying attention to what nightclub the aliens preferred, there were other aliens who were assembling a giant monster. Each one of the fleet of alien spaceships had carried a different part of this huge monster. Evidently I was the only person to discover this fact. When the dream got scary, I was about 20 feet from one of their space ships. It was a classic “flying saucer” shape, by the way, metallic silver. I don’t know what I was doing there, probably trying to get an autograph or something stupid. There was a large gangway extending out from the saucer. One of the alien started walking very slowly down the gangway. It was leading something on a tether. Gradually more and more of the thing was revealed. It was an immense hand that was “walking” by its fingers dragging its palm and wrist behind it. The hand was shaggy, covered with some kind of dark greenish-brown fur — it might have been moss. Their plan became clear to me. The aliens were going to assemble this monster, maybe breed a whole army of them and take over the world. I had to warn someone but I was standing just a little way from the spaceship, there was an alien standing right there looking straight at me and it had with it the power to crush me utterly.

Categories
Art papercraft

Papercraft – Slick Vampires and Monster Portraits

\"Medusa\" by Etsy artist Goobeetsa

I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.

Dracula puppets by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa
Dracula puppets by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa
Categories
"What We Fear"

Real Fear – “I’m Not Dead Yet!”

This cheery little news bit from the BBC reports that persons in at least FIVE British hospitals have been wrongly certified as dead. We’re not talking about Victorian England; one of these cases dates from 1996. I’m tempted to make a series of t-shirts and buttons with the warning “Are you really SURE I’m not dead?” As long as I can market this fear as a real and present threat, I’m sure to make a mint.

I know we have all sorts of things to worry about these days and there are claims made that those things are more important than, say, finding factual verification for premises from Edgar Allan Poe stories. But honestly, isn’t the idea of being mistaken for a dead person, well, at least a rather novel fear?

The BBC Report from 25 May, 2008 about Living People Mistaken for Dead Ones

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #172 – The Interrupted Murder

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare made me sick to my stomach when I was in the dream, when I woke from it and again now when I’m trying to write it down. It’s the worst nightmare I’ve had maybe ever.

It was a sunny afternoon and my wife and I were feeling like taking a ride in the country. One of us said “Let’s stop in on old JH. We haven’t seen him in years.” That part is true. We’ve been friends with JH for years but we only seem to see him every few months at really accidental moments. JH in both the dream and in real life lives out in the country so we though it’d be a fun little drive. In the dream, JH didn’t have a phone so we couldn’t call to let him know we were coming and since it was all so impromptu and carefree, we didn’t really mind if he wasn’t there when we showed up. Besides, we knew that JH’s wife had left him and we thought he might use some company. After a nice ride in the sun and fresh breeze, we pulled down the long gravel driveway to JH’s house which in the dream was really very small, nothing more than a four room shack, water stained and disheveled. We stopped in the driveway and there was an extremely odd feeling about the place, a deathly quiet. My wife didn’t think we should go in.

What we discovered is that JH had just that instant finished a murder spree. He still had a bloody hammer in his hand and his whole arm was drenched in gore. He had killed his youngest son while he was strapped in a high chair, his older son who was probably 3 or 4 and his wheelchair-bound mother. The bloodshed everywhere was unspeakable, nauseating. JH had a dazed look on his face, a numb, dead expression like he wasn’t at home in his head anymore. When we knocked on the screen door, he was just about to take his shotgun and kill himself. He had it all loaded and sitting ready on a cardboard table. He looked at us with total uncomprehension of who we were or what we were doing there. We didn’t know either. The silence was horrifically awkward, an aching, wrenching discomfort. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if he was about to kill us. I didn’t know if I should try to call the police or whether I should just let him kill himself, whether that would just be the easiest thing for everyone concerned.

And it was in that stifled instant of indecision, of terror that I woke unable to breathe.